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FAMILIES

My wedding day was the first best day of my life. I could not have ordered a more perfect day if I had had a menu of choices in front of me. The marriage to my best friend was what I was really looking forward to. I wanted to settle down and start a family and that’s what we did. Our ideal world was lost on Sept. 6th, 2003. My husband, a member of the National Guard, was activated two days before our second son was born. Two weeks later he went to Iraq on what ended up being almost a year-and-a-half journey where he fought for his country and I fought to maintain our home.

For years after his deployment, I watched him struggle. I scratched and clawed to get him resources that were difficult to coordinate. I begged for tests; I fought to be the voice he did not have; I fought to be heard. He would tell his health-care providers one thing, but I would witness another. They experimented with a string of antipsychotic drugs, leaving me to deal with the potential dangerous side effects without any heads up. I put up with way more than I should have, but I held tight to our “for better or worse” vows and the unbending belief that if the tables were turned he would do the same for me. He would take care of me, right? After years of working through the system, we finally got the diagnoses of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on top of post-traumatic stress disorder. His care team fought hard to make sure his needs were met. We even started a nonprofit geared toward helping veterans and their families.

As time went by, two more babies came. My husband had moments of happiness, but generally was deep in depression, struggling with severe migraines and issues with TBI. Suffice it to say that certain lines were crossed, and I felt I could no longer remain married to him. I asked him to leave and, on Friday, our divorce became final. He let me go without hesitation. For him, there was apparently no reason to fight to keep me. I don’t want to come across as a bitter ex-wife. But I am angry that our happy life, our loving relationship was destroyed in combat.

After all I had been through with him, I was now faced with another reality. Once you are divorced from a veteran, resources such as counseling go away. I even asked for help to tell him to leave the house but was told no, even though I worried for my safety. I was told their services were to provide a safe place for the veteran.

After all the hard work, devotion and advocacy, I felt demoted, unloved.

Veterans need to learn how to reintegrate into their families and how to take care of those families again; how to trust their spouses again. As a caregiver, you are put in a position of authority over your spouse, doling out daily “what to do’s,” managing the finances. What toll does that take on a marriage that is supposed to be built on equal partnership? At the same time, the caregiver feels forgotten, berated and belittled because his or her complaints pale in comparison to the pain, emotional or otherwise, of the veteran. What happens when we get sick? Surely we do not want to be told, as some spouses are, “It’s not like you’re dying! I know guys whose legs have been blown off.”

As it turns out, I am lucky. I have a job with benefits. But there are so many other military spouses who gave up careers and education to take care of their wounded partners, only to see their marriages disintegrate and find themselves emotionally devastated and without money. At that point, they no longer have access to the multitude of resources available to veterans and their families, such as Department of Veterans Affairs individual or group counseling or educational benefits. Many women who were dependent on their spouses’ incomes also find themselves financially in shambles after divorce. Such women, unless they were fiduciaries of their husbands’ veterans benefits, might have no access to that money during, or after, marriage.

So, now I am asking myself, what are those spouses supposed to do when they too serve their country and work so hard to help veterans and their families, but are not eligible for their services anymore because they are not family anymore. Many of us feel angry, like we were left holding the empty bag. I really wanted what my parents had, that 50 years together, growing old together thing. I wanted to be worth fighting for, too.

Jackie McMichael is from Durham, N.C., where she currently works as a professional development manager in the software industry. She was married for 15 years to an officer in the North Carolina National Guard and currently works in her spare time with veteran spouses and organizations.

Like many others, I was intrigued by the attention the film “American Sniper” was getting. I knew I was treading murky waters, but I decided to follow the herd and see the movie. Unlike most people in the crowd, I had a very personal stake in the film. “American Sniper” takes place in Iraq, my homeland, which I left shortly after the American-led invasion that Chris Kyle took part in. So the film, powerful and sad, left me with mixed thoughts and reminiscences.

Falluja — where much of the movie takes place — was, for American troops, a city of demons and horror. But before the 2003 invasion, during the years of the embargo against Iraq, Falluja was known as little more than a transit hub frequented by travelers heading to the western border with Jordan – as well as for its tasty kebab. Three days before the invasion, a group of five teenagers from Baghdad, my son among them, drove there after midnight for a late meal. It was the norm. Nobody was hurt.

When I was back in Baghdad in 2010, I found that my skills on the very roads where I had learned to drive were no longer viable because of traffic jams caused by checkpoints and blast walls. I had to be transported around by a cast of fearful drivers. One driver, Sa’ad, told me quietly one day, “I cannot serve you tomorrow.” When I asked why, he replied that he had to go to Hilla — about 70 miles south of Baghdad — to bring the children of his dead brother to their grandmother’s home. His eyes were teary.

In 2006, his brother, he and a cousin were in a car that broke down near an American base. While the three were leaning under the car’s hood, trying to fix the engine, someone – perhaps an American sniper – shot and killed the brother and cousin. Shielded from the sniper’s sight by the car, Sa’ad was spared.

“His head was on the radiator, and I was too scared to do anything,” Sa’ad said, sobbing. After the killing of her husband, Sa’ad’s sister-in-law moved with her children to her parents’ house in Hilla.

Then I remembered attending a doctor’s funeral in Amman in 2006. He had been shot in the head, apparently by an American soldier, while driving home from his clinic in Baghdad. The air conditioning was on in his car at the time, so he did not hear orders to stop. The doctor was 62. “We are very sorry,” his wife said the Americans told her son afterward. “Sorry will not bring him back,” she said, crying.

Sa’ad must have noticed my distraught face as he told me about his brother. “Sniper attacks, as much as they feel personal and painful, are a trivial fraction of the war,” he said. “What if I tell you about the victims of random killings, mortar attacks, raids, crossfires and explosions.” Since Sa’ad is the paternal uncle, he is obligated to support his late brother’s family.

“We leave it to God, the greatest avenger,” he said.

In the movie, I could not understand the connection between Iraq and 9/11 for people like Chris Kyle. Like many people in Iraq, I had not heard of Al Qaeda until the United States was attacked that day, even though I was working as a press officer at a European embassy.

On July 19, 2003, my daughter, son and I left Baghdad. Baghdad International Airport was under the control of the United States military, and it was allowing it to be used only for military purposes. So Iraqis had to make the 10-hour drive to Amman. At the border, an American soldier stood guard. He was barely 18, pimples filling his ruddy baby face.

“I just want to speak with someone,” he said, popping his head into our passenger-side window. “I have not spoken with anyone for a week now.”

I felt sorry for him, a stranger in this desert. I wondered out loud what had brought him here. He said he was trying to pay for college.

About 4,500 American soldiers and 500,000 Iraqis lost their lives to this war, not to mention those who were left with long-term disabilities. The Iraqi diaspora caused by the American-led invasion is among the largest in modern history. The first question Iraqis who were in Iraq in 2003 ask one another when connecting on social media is: “Which country are you in?” No family has been left untouched.

You might think that, after all these years and after all the tears and changes of jobs, cities, countries and even nationalities, I would have become desensitized to the war. But the movie made me realize that I am not. Evidently, the scars of those days will remain with me forever.

Yasmine Mousa is an Iraqi-Canadian journalist who left Iraq in 2003. She is also a certified translator and interpreter.

Last year, my co-worker Emma called to let me know she was driving away from Walter Reed for the very last time. She had just resigned. She thought she would feel sadness or have pangs of remorse. But instead she had just felt relieved. It was over.

Emma and I worked together as physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and then later its reincarnation, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, for nine years.

When we were first hired in 2005, Walter Reed was so busy with incoming casualties there was a rumor that they would erect M*A*S*H tents on the front lawn of the hospital to handle the overflow. That never happened. Instead, when the wards tasked with treating the wounded filled up, the new incoming soldiers (mostly men) went to Ward 67 – the gynecology unit.

In the amputee section, where Emma and I worked, we could tell you exactly how things were going for our ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the troop surges happened in 2007 and 2009, there were so many new amputees coming in that, in one week, I saw three of my co-workers cry. But the wounded kept coming. And somehow, by 2011, we were treating an average of 150 multi-limb amputees a day.

Emma confessed on the phone that she hadn’t felt right for months and had gone to her doctor. She said that after the doctor left the room, she read her chart. She knew she wasn’t super healthy, but it was altogether different to read in black and white that she didn’t exercise, drank frequently and had a stressful job.

I was only half listening, because I had the phone balanced between my shoulder and ear as I tried to pry the cap off a bottle of beer. Walter Reed hadn’t been that healthy for me, either.

You would think that in the amputee clinic you would get used to seeing amputations, but there was always something new. In the beginning, below knee amputations and below elbow amputations were the norm. But as the wars progressed and the bombs and terrain got deadlier, we saw amputations above the knee and above the elbow. And later amputations at the groin. Those progressed to include partial pelvic amputations.

As the amputations moved up the body one night I had a dream that we saw our first body amputee: a patient whose torso and neck had been neatly severed at the head.

How did my co-workers in my dream react when that single head came in? Like we always did: we cheered for him. And we said what we always said, “Look at you! Look how great you are doing!”

The young soldier who was now just a head smiled and agreed with us, relief visibly flooding his face. “I am doing O.K.,” he said, grateful to hear from somebody, anybody, that he was all right.

That’s how it was in our clinic. No matter how badly you were hurt we always thought you were doing great.

In 2009 our first surviving quadruple amputee was pushed into our rehab gym. It was the 100th anniversary of the hospital and outside on the front lawn a big party was going on. As our new patient entered, my co-workers leapt to their feet and let out a uniform “whoop!” As we clapped and cheered, our new patient waved the short stump of his right arm and flashed the room a brave grin.

“He is going to be an ambulator,” my supervisor said at that moment. Because in our clinic you were always going to walk again, no matter the wound.

You would think that working in a clinic that saw so much destruction would be depressing, but life in our clinic was always happy and, above all, funny. The patients wore T-shirts with slogans like “I had a Blast in Afghanistan” and “Marine – Some Assembly Required.” And they made fun of each other for having “paper cuts” instead of amputations.

Scattered among the patients were staff members who would animatedly discuss the latest infomercial we had seen on late night T.V. – prompting one of my colleagues to actually order a powder blue Snuggie (a blanket with sleeves) to wear to work.

When a patient had a birthday, he or she would proudly wear the Snuggie and a special birthday-cake-shaped hat while we stood around their wheelchair and sang loudly, and cheered (of course). We’d present a birthday cake – even though you weren’t supposed to have food in the physical therapy clinic. And then everyone would eat a slice of gooey cake. An hour later, that same patient would receive another birthday cake across the gym in occupational therapy.

Every day we brought in bewildered new amputees to join our playground — on big hospital chairs that you could flatten out and roll like an operating room stretcher. We’d tie their IV poles to the back of the chair and hang their wound vacuum machines, nerve blocks, catheter bags and various drains off the armrests, and then haphazardly push them down the long corridors to the rehab gym. Their family members would trail behind us, mute with shock.

To fill in the silence of the voyage we would prattle happily along, pointing out all the great places the young veteran could visit in the hospital: the DFAC (dining facility), the barber shop, the PX (military store) — once he or she was well enough to get into a wheelchair. The highlight of our “tour” was passionately describing the weekly cafeteria specials to our captive and stunned audience.

But before an eyebrow could be raised, the tour was interrupted with a sharp warning: “Bump!” And the patient would brace him or herself for the incredible jolt of pain as their stretcher rolled over the smallest crack in the floor. And we, the staff, did our best to buffer it for them.
Adele Levine worked as a physical therapist at Walter Reed from 2005 until 2014, and is now in private practice in Silver Spring, Md. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Washingtonian and Psychology Today, and she is the author of “Run, Don’t Walk: The Curious and Chaotic Life of a Physical Therapist Inside Walter Reed Army Medical Center.” Follow her on Twitter: @PTAdele.

No millennial worth his iPhone remembers life before social media. While previous generations’ warfighters wrote letters or phoned home over spotty connections, Marines today can post on Instagram photos of themselves sitting atop cans of ammunition. In 2010, the photojournalist Teru Kuwayama and his collaborators embedded in Afghanistan to start a Facebook page for the First Battalion, Eighth Marines to communicate with loved ones. Far from resulting in just another live-stream of minutiae, their Basetrack project became a way for deployed troops to maintain relationships with their families. The resulting trove of photos and videos provide ample fodder for “Basetrack Live” — the onstage story of one corporal’s deployment and homecoming, and the effects on his family.

For both the battalion and a nation’s artists, self-reflection occurred stunningly quickly through the use of social media. Anne Hamburger, executive producer of En Garde Arts, the company behind “Basetrack Live,” said she felt it was important to document the human side of going to war, without sensationalizing the experience.

“The issues are so complex” when an ordinary person deploys, Ms. Hamburger said. Her biggest challenge for the production, which is showing at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and will be going on a national tour, was paring down the “incredible wealth of material,” she said.

Ms. Hamburger reached out through Facebook, gathering more than 100 respondents and conducting three dozen interviews to cull images and video for the project. Every word in “Basetrack Live” is taken from interviews with Marines or members of their families.

This citizen journalism captures the truth of troops’ feelings during deployment, including graffiti about pornography, and profane, funny rules for standing watch and cleaning toilets. The images chosen for the production reflect the Marines’ brotherhood, including an impressive assortment of tattoos. Because of the authentic, emotion-rich material, the Marines are painted neither as heroes nor victims.

The plot delves into the relationship between Cpl. A. J. Czubai and his wife, Melissa. Corporal Czubai is played by Tyler La Marr, a former Marine Corps sergeant and the founder of the Society of Artistic Veterans. Mr. La Marr is quick to point out that his experiences as a signals intelligence analyst in Iraq were distinctly different from Corporal Czubai’s infantry deployments to Afghanistan.

Initially, Mr. La Marr was worried that Corporal Czubai would be angry “because a pogue is telling his story!” he said in an interview, referring to military slang for “a person other than grunt,” or infantryman. But talking with Corporal Czubai helped, and the actor acknowledged that his boot camp training, with its ethos of “every Marine a rifleman,” gave him a head start on the role.

Melissa Czubai, played by Ashley Bloom, wrestles with a lack of control over situations engineered by the Marine Corps, including A. J.’s inability to be present for the birth of their daughter because of his predeployment training. “Basetrack Live” also includes the perspectives of other wives and girlfriends, and that of one Marine’s mother, to illustrate the war’s toll on families.

The web of relationships also highlights the desire of civilians to hear from Marines in close-to-real-time, bringing to light the space between deployed and home environments, and the nuanced human drama that it spans. Social media’s rapid communications can be a mixed blessing, as worries on the home front can be transmitted to deployed troops, and electrons can convey flaring tempers in both directions. Of greatest concern were erroneous reports of casualties on Facebook, which only served to accelerate the rumor mill among wives and girlfriends. In Corporal Czubai’s case, his wife learned of his best friend’s death before he did, even though he was in a neighboring company in Afghanistan.

The speed of modern life, reflected in social media, can also be jarring to nerves accustomed to a contained, mission-focused environment. After being wounded in a firefight, Corporal Czubai is sent back to the United States, while his comrades carry on in Afghanistan. This loss of his unit’s camaraderie disorients him. Overwhelmed by paranoia and guilt, he drinks, buys an array of weapons, threatens suicide and struggles with a strained marriage. He eventually accepts counseling from the Department of Veterans Affairs, but the play avoids a saccharine ending.

Now out of the Marine Corps and studying for a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, Corporal Czubai has seen several performances of “BaseTrack Live” and found the adaptation of his story “captivating.”

Ms. Hamburger said that she intended for the show to walk a fine line: conveying emotion without being overly sentimental about the participants’ experiences. The music — original compositions by Edward Bilous, Michelle DiBucci and Greg Kalember — blends a variety of styles: the rush of initial deployment to Afghanistan mixes powerful hip-hop with tribal tunes, while the disorientation of combat is illustrated by crashing rock and bright lights.

Using authentic videos and images, “Basetrack Live” offers a realistic perspective on relationships when one partner has gone to war, and how, after the long road home, social media can be a useful tool to build a sense of community. The wives and girlfriends of those serving in the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, who found each other via the project’s Facebook page, offered one another support, including tactics for waking sleeping Marines with hair-trigger reactions. And many of the Marines, themselves, stayed in touch with one another long after returning home, and were trading bear hugs at Tuesday night’s performance.

In future wars, the speed of communication will only get faster. Short of hologramming into combat, service members’ loved ones cannot get much closer than connecting daily via social media. Emotionally, this can blur the lines between battlefield and home front. “Basetrack Live” ably captures this juxtaposition and its aftermath, affording viewers a fresh look at war’s realities and at the challenges of coming home.
“Basetrack Live” was adapted by Jason Grote in collaboration with Seth Bockley and Anne Hamburger. It is playing at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, (651 Fulton St, Brooklyn) through Saturday.

Teresa Fazio was a Marine Corps officer from 2002 to 2006 and deployed to Iraq. She lives and works in New York, and is writing a memoir about a relationship during deployment.

Marines of the First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment responded to enemy contact in Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004.Credit Courtesy of Thomas James Brennan

On Nov. 6, 2004, NATO forces launched an assault on Falluja, a city north of Baghdad that had become a magnet for Sunni insurgent forces. Thomas Brennan, then a 19-year-old Marine Corps lance corporal, was one of the infantrymen with First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment who would participate in the attack. The battalion suffered numerous casualties in the battle, one of the bloodiest for American forces since Vietnam. Now a journalism student, Mr. Brennan recalls the battle with the help of some of the Marines and sailors he fought beside.

Grains of sand floated through motionless air as beams of light crept through sandbagged windows. Young men sat mesmerized by the words echoing from walls scarred by years of war.

Through cigarette smoke and desert confetti, Doug Bahrns, who was then a Marine second Lieutenant, exuded confidence and trepidation as he explained over two hours the details of our mission and what should happen when — not if — we were wounded. He paused often, gazing into the darkness above our heads. He knew he wouldn’t bring us all home.

Now a major assigned to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, Major Bahrns recalled recently the weight he felt leading Marines “into such a large-scale fight where it was inevitable someone was going to get killed.”

“Nov. 10, 2004, is one of the most significant days of my life, changing not only my life, but other’s lives,” Major Bahrns said. “It put into perspective life, death and the brotherhood within military service. That was the first day, alongside my fellow Marines, that I truly felt I’d cemented my place among them.”

Ten years ago, roughly 13,500 American, British and Iraqi forces attacked Falluja, Iraq, where roughly 4,000 insurgents fought from trenches, tunnels and houses, using improvised explosive devices, rifles, rockets and machine guns. During the 46-day battle, roughly 2,000 insurgents were killed and 1,500 captured. By Dec. 23, 107 members of coalition forces had died and 613 were wounded. Alongside Lieutenant Bahrns, in Alpha Company, First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, 17 died and 102 were wounded. It was the heaviest urban combat since the 1968 Battle of Hue City during the Vietnam War.

Before Lieutenant Bahrns’s first sunset in Falluja, he screamed for a corpsman to save his good friend, First Lt. Daniel T. Malcolm. Lieutenant Malcolm loved to study military tactics as much as he loved playing chess, which to him was yet another way he could train his mind to defeat an opponent. If life were a brilliancy — a deeply strategic chess match — he made his a brevity, which is winning a chess game in 25 moves — his age when he was killed in action.

I regret playing chess with Lieutenant Malcolm only once. After four months of convoys as his driver, I struggle now that I didn’t allow myself to hurt when he died. I was never lucky enough to befriend the man I admired most.

Sgt. Billy Leo is everything I imagine a Bronx native to be – crude and opinionated with a hair trigger, once tearing my “Yankees Suck” T-shirt from my body. I can’t count how many times he pointed out my mistakes, but I cherish the times he gave me his approval.

“Falluja got the better of me once I came home. I really missed it even though it sucked,” said Mr. Leo, a 37-year-old New York City firefighter. “There isn’t one day where I don’t think about that battle.”

“It was a lot of adrenaline,” he added. “Nothing will ever give you that feeling again.”

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The helmet of a Marine from the First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, bears the names of brethren killed in action during the battle of Falluja.Credit Courtesy of Thomas James Brennan

Mike Ergo, then a corporal, admired Sergeant Leo’s leadership and feared wearing Red Sox attire. November, for Mr. Ergo, is no longer a month he avoids. His daughter Adeline was born on Nov. 4, 2010, and his career providing peer support to other veterans led him to pursue a master’s degree in clinical social work.

Working as a counselor at the Department of Veterans Affairs Vet Center in Concord, Calif., has helped him “come home.” Battling guilt, loss and grief for years, Mr. Ergo credits his career with helping him overcome living with the loss of life, both American and Iraqi.

“I’d do it all again, even if I knew I wouldn’t agree with the political reasons or if I knew all of the fighting wouldn’t bring peace to the region,” said Mr. Ergo, 31. “The level of love and commitment we have for our fellow Marines means that you’ll go through hell with them not wanting to trade places with anyone.”

Fighting alongside us in First Platoon was Staff Sgt. Adam Banotai. In his squad of 17, he watched 11 Marines become casualties. His platoon earned 37 Purple Heart medals and five awards for valor.

“It petrifies me that I made a decision that was based off of my feelings and not good tactical judgment,” said Mr. Banotai. “None of what my guys say makes me stop thinking I could have pushed them harder, saved them from shedding so much blood. Those men are my heroes.”

Since Nov. 26, 2004, Reinaldo Aponte, then a petty officer third class line corpsman, has felt pained when he remembered the Marine he could not save. He was pulled away from Lance Cpl. Bradley Faircloth’s body believing he had done his best. But replaying the situation in his mind since, he still wonders: Could he have done more?

“I didn’t look at any of the Marines. I was so angry, screaming incoherently. I cried, feeling like I’d let my squad down,” said Mr. Aponte, now 31, of Milwaukee. “I was scared they wouldn’t trust me anymore. I didn’t want them to be afraid to call on me as their corpsman. I needed to remain a part of the squad. I was afraid of losing all of them because I lost Brad.”

As the chaplain for our battalion, Lt. Dennis Cox spent hours with us discussing our concerns. He tried to justify killing the enemy. He prayed for each of us. He wiped tears from our eyes. He cleaned the blood from the faces of our fallen. He too, cannot stop reliving our battle.

He is now a commander in the Chaplain Corps at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia. “When they die, a part of you goes with them,” Commander Cox said. “We smell something, we see something, we hear something and it triggers something we were doing 10 years ago.”

Over the years, Commander Cox has stayed in touch with the families of our fallen. Just like us, he considers them family. For him, it’s a painful reminder of how much they lost.

Kathleen Faircloth knew what to expect. Her son, Bradley, was wounded twice before the second battle of Falluja. Marines standing in their dress uniforms at her front door meant only one thing. For 10 years, she hasn’t showed anger toward our platoon. Instead, she is glad we remember her son. As long as his memory is alive, she said, she will find happiness.

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Lance Cpl. Bradley Faircloth in Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004.Credit Courtesy of Thomas James Brennan

“I lost a son, but I gained children across the country. I know that if I ever needed anything, they would do anything they could to help me,” said Ms. Faircloth, now 50, of Fairhope, Ala. “I hope they find peace in their heart, because seeing them miserable isn’t how I want to see them.”

Whether still in uniform or having moved on to a different chapter of our lives, remembering is something we can’t fail to do. While some have a memorial in Massachusetts, Alabama or at The Citadel, some veterans of Falluja remember each of their fallen brethren through writing, by advocating for the Iraqi families we displaced, or by displaying the noble and true face of our generation.

In the last 10 years, we’ve lost sons, brothers, wives and children, struggling to maintain our own sanity and even after many failed attempts, we continue helping one another from becoming part of the suicide epidemic. Some of us, much like in Falluja, are still bounding house-to-house, searching for something we left behind and a way to evade what we brought home.

Thomas James Brennan is studying investigative journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Before being medically retired in 2012, he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines. He is a member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart and the recipient of a 2013 Dart Center honorable mention and the 2014 American Legion Fourth Estate Award. Follow him on Twitter: @thomasjbrennan

Just before Sept. 11, 2001, my teenage brother Mike, fresh from Air Force training, pressed something small into my palm: two pin-backings stubbed on a curled shape in dusky silver. Jump wings.

“If you keep them safe, I’ll always be safe,” he said.

My brothers and I had always tried to protect each other. Chris, the younger, was calm, but Mike was rambunctious. When I was 4 and they were toddlers, I would sneak into their room past midnight to ensure they still occupied their dual cribs. I would poke a finger through the crib slats, slide up their eyelids, and check their breathing as they slept. Safe in their company, I would curl up on the floor for a minute, then pad back to my pink-swathed bed. But by elementary school, our parents had divorced, and anger ran through our thin walls.

When I was 14, our stepfather and Mike, 12, got in a fight over pajamas. Too cowardly to burst in, I stayed in bed and turned up my Walkman. Mike sobbed himself to sleep with a nosebleed that soaked his mattress. He had misbehaved, but my crime felt worse — I had let him thrash alone. As the years passed, conflicts with our stepfather prompted police cruiser lights on our street. When I finished high school, Mike’s card to me read, “…Stay another year? Please?” I should have ensured my brothers grew up strong. Instead I fled.

At 18, I paid for college with a Marine Corps R.O.T.C. scholarship; the military’s rules seemed enlightened next to the ones back home. Mike later barreled into the same Boston unit as an Air Force cadet. He tagged along on field exercises with us upperclassmen, easily completing grueling hikes and rappelling down university buildings. My senior year, the Twin Towers fell, and I knew at some point I would deploy. The following June, Mike and Chris pinned gold lieutenant bars on my shoulders.

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Teresa Fazio receiving her Marine Corps commission in 2002, with her two brothers, Chris on the left and Mike on the right. Credit Courtesy of Teresa Fazio

Two years later, on an Iraqi base, I nervously strapped myself into an androgynous Kevlar jacket. Tromping around our gravel-strewn compound, I doled out candy and phone cards while waiting for mortars to fall. We plodded through our days, trusting in grace that wherever we stepped was safe. Late at night, when the desert heat lifted, I taught my Marines martial arts. As we punched foam mats and dragged each other through the sand, I wondered how my fist would feel against my stepfather’s face, how much pressure my forearm required to choke his carotid artery. But I could not predict the techniques my sparring partners threw; I could only try to counter them. And my rage did not help me lead.

One night, I ordered my troops to repair broken cables across an exposed airfield. Mortars exploded in front of them. Riddled with anxiety, I monitored the radio, counting heads. My dog tags said I was 23 years old. I felt 80.

Meanwhile, Mike graduated from R.O.T.C. He mailed me his uniform cap on which to fasten his lieutenant’s insignia, a shiny “butterbar,” the same way he had once pinned on mine. I sent it back from Iraq, properly pinned, with two more matte-bronze lieutenant bars thrown into the envelope for good luck.

In war, officers mark their rank subtly in order to hide from snipers. In childhood, I had learned to fly under the radar. From 8,000 miles away, I still tried to coach my firebrand brother on avoiding trouble. But soon he had become a combat controller, jumping from planes and calling in airstrikes for troops on the ground. His specialized training would supersede all of my advice. The Marine in me was impressed. The sister in me was terrified.

Still, I knew where his jump wings were. I had pinned them into a nylon wallet next to a note from our late Italian grandmother. On a hospital menu, she had written, “Non dare a calci ogni piccola pietra per strada — aspetta per una piri grande.” “Do not kick every small stone on the road — wait for a large rock.” That is, pick your battles.

I picked Iraq. As I waited for my Marines to call me from that mortar-scarred airfield, I knew we were also at risk from rockets in the shower or the radio tent. Ducking prematurely was no guard against hardship. My platoon proved lucky; despite my new-lieutenant stumbles, we all lived. And however much I cared for Mike, I couldn’t completely protect him, whether from family violence, incoming rounds, or planes in a blue autumn sky. Now it was his turn to jump.

He survived his first deployment, and the next, and four more after that. He is currently serving on his seventh tour overseas. So I trust in dark, brushed metal. And I keep his jump wings safe.

Teresa Fazio spent four years as a Marine Corps officer from 2002 to 2006, deploying once to Iraq. She lives and works in New York City and is writing a memoir about a deployment relationship.

It was dark. Iraq. The middle of the night. The height of the insurgency. The explosion shook our insides. I ran up to my friend and looked at what was left of his body. His limbs were blown off. His eyes were still open but he stared off into nothingness. He gasped and choked as his body was still trying to breathe. I did everything I could to save him, but he still died in my arms.

This is what I brought home from the war with me, and it almost killed me. Or, I should say: This, and many similar incidents like this from my deployment, is why I almost killed myself when I returned home.

I was just a boy when I joined my country’s military. Eighteen years old. I was untested and unproven and I thought that joining a Special Operations unit and fighting in a war was the only way to prove my love of country, and my self-worth. But I learned an extremely hard and valuable lesson: War is not glorious. There are no monologues. There are no curtain calls where everyone joins hands on stage and bows to the audience at the end.

It is messy. It is violent. It makes you hate your enemy, even long after the war is over. It brings out the worst in people.

It brings out the worst in you.

Or at least, so I once believed. For the last six years, I felt an honor and pride in the hardships I had faced. But I also felt a hate and mistrust for the Iraqi people I had fought, and tried to protect. And I still harbored those feelings right up until one recent morning. Right up until brunch time, when my son’s kindergarten class decided to have a “Teddy Bear Picnic.” An event that would teach me a sobering and humbling life lesson.

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Gerardo Mena and his son.Credit Courtesy of Gerardo Mena

I was busy unrolling and perfectly placing my son’s Spider-Man blanket that we made from a No-Sew kit last year, when I saw them preparing their own blanket a few feet from us. Arabs. I could feel my stomach muscles clench as that initial wave of hate began crashing itself against my insides. That uncontrollable spider sense that lingered from the war. The one I couldn’t seem to turn off. The one that kept me safe, vigilant and hateful.

I seated myself on our blanket with my back to them, not wanting the image of them to spoil my day off and ruin my precious time with my son, the way they spoiled my mid-twenties.

Three bites into my bologna sandwich and I decided I didn’t want my back to them because it made me nervous. Always vigilant, I told myself. So my son and I boot-scooted around so I could place my beady, mistrustful eyes on them. Then they surprised me.

These weren’t the typical extremist types. They couldn’t be. They looked amazing. This Arab man, late twenties (still fighting age) had a short beard. One could argue an Americanized or Western-style facial hair that is popular right now in Hollywood (Ryan Gosling, anybody?). He had on a tan argyle sweater, black jeans and beige loafers. He was quite stylish, and a far cry from sporting a suicide bomber’s vest. His wife had on a colorful dress full of pink, white and brown Rorschach stripes with a matching hijab, and she radiated a warmth and beauty and kindness that I’ve never seen in an Arab (Iraqi or otherwise). And then there were their two twin daughters who were absolutely adorable in their jumpers and their dark hair done up in matching pink bows. This family looked like they were taken straight out of a magazine.

They looked more respectable and modern than my slightly-dirty-yet-still-smells-clean-enough Old Navy pullover, broken-in blue jeans, tired-looking eyes, and brown sandals with random threads hanging out of the stitching.

It was then that the two kindergarten girls called out to my son, said hi, and waved to him with matching piano-like grins. My son turned around and returned the sentiment and went back to eating his bologna sandwich.

Then, another boy two feet away with a mop full of bright red hair and a face full of freckles said hi to my boy. He, again, returned the sentiment and went back to eating his sandwich. Then, an African-American boy said hi. My boy, again, returned the sentiment. Then, my boy initiated his own greeting and said hi to an awkwardly tall Caucasian girl two blankets away. And before I knew it, my boy had greeted, or had been greeted by, all 22 kids in his class, no matter their race or religion or age. It was beautiful to watch.

The teacher called for the students to line back up to go inside. I looked over and the Arab couple had turned their backs to me.

I stood up and brushed the grass off my legs and peered over their shoulders. I saw both of them braiding their daughters’ hair, putting their pink bows back in place and then hugging their children as lovingly as I hugged my own son. Then the twins ran over and grabbed my boy by the hand and they skipped over to the lineup area together.

I realized I wasn’t some hardened ex-war hero fighting machine. I was just a racist jerk. And all it took was a lunch period with a class full of 6-year-olds to show me that America was still the greatest country in the world and that there was still hope for me to become a better man. A real man.
Gerardo Mena, a decorated veteran of the war in Iraq, spent six years with the Reconnaissance Marines. He is the author of the war poetry collection, “The Shape of Our Faces No Longer Matters.” For more information go to www.gerardomena.com

How does it feel when the country for which you’ve lost youth, relationships and health wants to get rid of you? It feels like betrayal. If the Army is our family, then this is divorce.

The week of June 22 was a hard one for Army captains. After announcing in early December that about 20 percent of captains commissioned in 2006, 2007 and 2008 would receive pink slips this spring, the cuts were finally handed down starting June 23. Those who were chosen for the ax (or, as Army officials more tactfully call it, separation) were given the bad news in a meeting with a senior officer. Everyone else waited nervously to see whether they would be next.

The Army isn’t the only service enduring reductions. The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps have announced “force shaping,” too. While officers face separation boards or are denied promotions — and, therefore, required to exit — even more enlisted service members are being downsized. Instead of being asked to leave after being reviewed, however, they are simply not permitted to re-enlist, an action that had been all but guaranteed when the wars were raging. While the Army stands at about 520,000 soldiers today, the Pentagon’s 2015 budget proposal calls for it to shrink by almost 60,000 by 2017.

About 1,100 Army captains in June heard “Thank you for your service. You have until April 1 to exit the Army.” About 500 Army majors were to get the same news this week. My husband escaped the reduction — this time. Many of my friends’ husbands and, by extension, my friends themselves, were not so lucky. After giving between seven and as many as 17 years of service, these officers and their families are being ordered to leave. Many of them don’t have a backup career plan. When they joined the Army they, like my husband and me, planned to stay 20 years or more.

They have watched buddies die, missed anniversaries, first steps and birthdays. And now, just like that, it is all over.

For the entirety of our Army service the enemy has been “over there,” far away in Afghanistan or Iraq. We grew comfortable with the danger of deployments, reassuring ourselves that in a down economy where factory-working or cubicle-dwelling civilian friends faced layoffs, we had job security. With a steady paycheck on the 1st and 15th of the month, military service felt safe compared to the nightmare of unemployment. But it doesn’t anymore.

Officer separations have been used throughout American history as a means of controlling the size of the force. Targeting cuts at certain commission-year groups is not new. When the military didn’t need you anymore, it let you go. It happened after World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Downsizing is a normal way for the military to recover from war.

But none of us were around then. We don’t care that it’s all been done before. For us it feels fresh, terrifying and even insulting. Force reductions feel very personal and, after all is said and done, rather arbitrary. When the cuts were announced, Army officials said that primarily those with poor evaluations or reprimands on their record would be targeted. But nothing ever works as seamlessly in real life as on paper. Those who “deserve it” are not the only ones who get fired.

“I just don’t understand why us,” my friend whose spouse was selected for the cuts told me. “There are so many others who are worse.”

After giving up her blooming career as a counselor to follow her husband to a new duty station, and spending at least 39 months without him during their relationship thanks to training and deployments, she doesn’t understand what more they could have done to deserve to stay.

There is one kind of survivor’s guilt when friends and neighbors are arbitrarily cut down by war. There is another kind when friends and neighbors are arbitrarily cut down by peace. When my friends’ husbands were killed or seriously injured downrange, I didn’t understand why we made it out unscathed. But now I feel a sense of survivor’s guilt that my spouse has a job while so many others soon won’t. Did they really escape death on the battlefield only to be a casualty of force reductions? And while my family is safe for now, this won’t be the only time the Army makes cuts. Over our heads hangs the cloud of “maybe we’re next.”

When a job is a way of life and your coworkers are your family, pink slips feel like betrayal. After years of combat deployments, training separations, child births while alone and cross-country moves, we have given so much in the service of our country. The military has become the closest family many of us have ever had. And now, just like that, some of us are orphans.
Amy Bushatz is an Army wife, mother and the managing editor of Military.com’s SpouseBuzz blog. You can follow her on Twitter at @amybushatz.

Anthony and Ivonne Thompson at the bar where Anthony proposed in November 2006.Credit

For Ivonne Thompson, 36, pulling her husband from his wheelchair to bathe him is a way to find time for their marriage. “It is the only intimacy we have left,” she says.

Her husband, Anthony Thompson, 32, survived an explosion of an improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., while he was serving as a Navy corpsman in Iraq. He was left with a diffuse axonal injury — a severe form of traumatic brain injury — and is paralyzed, unable to communicate verbally or physically.

The care Ms. Thompson provides has become an “everyday kind of routine,” she says. After she takes their 6-year-old son, Anthony Jr., to school, she sets to Anthony Sr.’s daily care: range-of-motion exercises for his arms and legs, chest percussions for his breathing. When he has appointments, she drives him to the Veterans Affairs hospital. When there are questions about his care, she discusses options with his doctors.

“After all that,” Ms. Thompson says, “I become the wife.”

The faces of military caregivers — the spouses, the loved ones, the family members and best friends who care for the wounded survivors of war — have long been just out of view, out-of-focus entries on the gray page of veterans’ issues. But a study conducted by the RAND Corporation in conjunction with the Elizabeth Dole Foundation, released in March, has brought into sharp relief the reality of the 5.5 million military caregivers nationwide, one-fifth of whom provide care to veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Over all, caregivers today are younger than those of previous generations, have fewer support networks and are at a much higher risk for depression and suicide.

For people like Ms. Thompson, caregiving is a full-time commitment to ensuring quality of life for veterans who need help bathing, feeding and administering medications. For others, supporting their loved ones is less hands-on, but no less challenging.

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Natalie Tarte with her husband, Chris Tarte, at a medical facility in November 2011.Credit

Natalie Tarte’s focus is maintaining a stable home environment for her husband, Chris Tarte, and their three young children. Mr. Tarte lost his right foot in an I.E.D. attack in Afghanistan. When doctors said his left leg, which was also mangled in the explosion, could be salvaged, the Tartes were hopeful. But after more than a dozen surgeries and nearly a year in a specialized halo cast called a Taylor Spatial Frame, doctors say the chance of saving the leg is low.

Mr. Tarte also has post-traumatic stress disorder and a form of traumatic brain injury that induces seizures. He has problems with his memory. He sometimes becomes disoriented and frustrated.

According to the RAND Corporation study, caregivers of post-9/11 veterans provide care for emotional and behavioral challenges more often than caregivers from previous wars did, and are four times more likely than non-caregivers to battle depression.

“Chris’s outbursts can be hurtful,” said Ms. Tarte, who has been placed on antidepressants. “It’s hard being married to someone that you basically don’t know. Sometimes there is just a feeling of hopelessness.”

One of the study’s more alarming findings was that more than 37 percent of post-9/11 caregivers reported difficulties because of uncertainty about their loved ones’ conditions and the treatments they were receiving. That number was twice that of pre-9/11 caregivers.

According to Rajeev Ramchand, the study’s co-leader and a senior behavioral scientist at RAND, many military caregivers have no formal support network. “There is a particular need for programs that focus on the younger caregivers who aid the newest veterans,” Mr. Ramchand said.

Emery Popoloski, 27, is one of those young caregivers, providing care for her husband, Charlie Popoloski, 29, who has debilitating seizures and severe post-traumatic stress from a rocket attack he survived while on his first tour to Iraq. The seizures, though often short, prevent Mr. Popoloski from performing involved tasks such as cooking or driving, and make supervision necessary.

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Charlie and Emery Popoloski were reunited at Logan Airport in Boston in January 2009, after eight months apart.Credit

“I feel like you’re a parent watching a kid at a playground,” Ms. Popoloski says of her husband. “You let them go play, but you’re always watching.”

Ms. Popoloski quit her job in September to stay at home with her husband and their two daughters: Caitlin, 3, and Elizabeth, 4 months. But as her husband’s sole caregiver, she has concerns about the future.

“What would happen if I died?” she asked. “What would happen to my kids if something happened to me? What would happen to my husband’s care?”

In 2010, Congress passed the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act, allowing the Veterans Affairs Department to offer financial support and other services to military caregivers. The support, which includes a monthly stipend, mental health services and counseling, and access to health insurance, is available to those caring for veterans suffering from serious injuries — including traumatic brain injury, psychological trauma and other mental disorders — incurred in the line of duty on or after Sept. 11, 2001.

Though the RAND study is largely an overview of contemporary military caregivers, it raises tough questions about the future of veterans’ care and the health and wellbeing of those yoked with administering it. These are questions that — according to former Senator Elizabeth Dole, Republican of North Carolina, whose foundation commissioned the study — point to the future and confirm that military caregiving is an “urgent societal crisis.”

The report offers several recommendations, including creating programs to foster caregiving skills and approaches and conducting research into caregiving and caregivers to help ensure continued attention to their needs.

For many caregivers, a brighter future is all they can hope for.

“You need to keep moving forward,” Ms. Popoloski says. “You’re going to die if you stay in the same place.”

Jacob W. Sotak served in the United States Army Reserve for 10 years, including a tour in Afghanistan. He graduated from Dartmouth College and now works as a news assistant at The New York Times. Follow him on Twitter: @JWSotak

It is 2014, and to America the war in Afghanistan is over. President Obama’s draw-down year is upon us, and as quickly as 2013 ended when the ball dropped, it seems, so did the nation’s memory of its longest running war.

But while the country may have forgotten, and only the dead have seen the end of it, for the wounded the war never ends.

Reading the article, I couldn’t help but think of my friend Jessie Fletcher, who had deployed twice to Afghanistan and then found himself fighting once more, as a double amputee, to reclaim a life of normalcy.

His tale of resiliency is the story of many veterans. And as the years pass, his triumphs and struggles, and those of his comrades-in-arms, will perhaps come to define that sliver of millennials who took the road less traveled.

The road to war.

***

I was in the library when I found out Jessie had been blown up.

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Jessie Fletcher preparing for patrol in May 2010 in Marja, Afghanistan.Credit Lakota 4.

It was the fall of 2011, my first two months of college after leaving the Marines in January of that year. My uniforms had been folded and put in containers that might not see the light of day for years. I had resorted to hard drives, thousands of megabytes of photos, to recall a life so different from my current one as a student that it seemed like a dream.

I was almost ready to be a student, ready to stop calling the cafeteria a chow hall and to let my hair grow long and unkempt.

But Jessie Fletcher changed all that.

I had met him in 2009, a wide-eyed junior Marine who wore a leather jacket, channeled The Fonz from “Happy Days” and talked sometimes a little too softly for an infantryman.

“Fletcher has been hit, double amputee, critical right now, next few hours vital.”

On Oct. 17, 2011, he was three days away from his 23rd birthday when his legs were blown from his body on a dusty, windswept hill in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

***

Jessie, a Marine corporal from Watertown, N.Y., with dark features and shocks of black hair, was the assistant leader of an eight-man scout/sniper team — a unit that prided itself as being “the eyes and ears” of the infantry battalion it called home.

In October 2011 Jessie’s team was deployed to Sangin, Afghanistan, and in direct support of the First Battalion of the Sixth Marine Regiment, while the battalion conducted one of the last major American-led operations of the war.

Sangin became infamous in the spring of 2010 when the Third Battalion of the Fifth Marine Regiment suffered the highest casualty rate of any unit to operate in Afghanistan since the start of the war in 2001.

In 2011 the district had barely calmed down. Thousands of improvised explosive devices were still embedded in canals and roadways, making counter-insurgency operations in population centers tedious and bloody. Taliban fighters would use the devices to initiate ambushes, maiming Marines and then attacking those who funneled into the kill zone to retrieve their wounded buddies.

That Oct. 17, Jessie’s team had been ordered to keep watch over a hill that would allow it to observe friendly patrols and convoys in the valley below.

“We didn’t want to go up there,” Jessie said. “We knew they had I.E.D.’s planted all over that hill, but the battalion insisted.”

His team slipped out in the predawn darkness, and in the hours that followed, the team — call sign Jäger 2 — moved methodically onto a ridge that would give it a commanding view of the valley.

Jessie, armed with a carbine and a semiautomatic sniper rifle named Victoria, after Victoria’s Secret, ushered his Marines into position to maximize their visibility.

He was checking on the rear security of his team when he stepped on a 15-pound charge of homemade explosives.

“We couldn’t see anything, and we could only hear a little,” said Donald Carter, the team’s corpsman, or medic. “It took us a minute to figure out it was Jess that was hit.”

Jessie was conscious, bloody and confused, at the bottom of a shallow blast crater. His eardrums shattered, he calmly looked at Carter and asked, “Am I ever going to be able to play guitar again?”

The blast had taken both of his legs above the knee. He also lost fingers from both hands when the synthetic grip of his rifle blew apart, sending shards of black plastic into his hands and forearms.

Carter jumped in the crater and started working on him, placing tourniquets on both legs and arms to stanch the bleeding while keeping up a gentle banter to make sure he did not lose consciousness.

“I kept him awake the whole time, asking him every stupid question I could think of,” Carter said.

A Black Hawk medical helicopter had been denied permission to enter the airspace over Fletcher’s team because it lacked an armed escort for protection. But after five minutes of purgatory the pilot disobeyed orders and landed anyway. The rotor wash kicked up the loose Afghan dust and pelted Jessie’s wounds with debris as Carter huddled over him. Jessie was pulled into the helicopter, which ascended, banked to the north and sped toward Camp Bastion at more than 150 miles per hour.

As the rest of the team members left the hill, they found eight more mines.

Jessie arrived at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., later that October as copper-colored leaves blew through the chilled streets.

It was late on a Friday when I drove to see him arrive from Landstuhl, Germany. He was sitting up and smiling when they unloaded the ambulance, his stumps connected to tubes that drained the fluid and blood as his body worked overtime to repair the damage. His hands were bandaged as well, boxing gloves of gauze wrapped from his fingers to his forearms.

Yet his face had been untouched. In the chaos of the explosion it escaped the flying steel that cut through every appendage. And so there was Jessie, hopped-up on morphine and flirting with I.C.U. nurses as they wheeled him in and locked his bed in place.

A room away, a lance corporal from another unit lay in a coma while his family slept in the waiting room. No voices there, just the steady, robotic inhale and exhale of the Marine’s ventilator, masked by Jessie’s nervous laughter.

***

Flash forward almost two years. Jessie is wearing his dress blues over black prosthetic legs, and Donald Carter, the man who saved his life, is watching as he slips a wedding band onto Emily Ball’s ring finger.

It is Nov. 16, 2013, and Jessie is getting married in the Childress Vineyards outside Winston-Salem, N.C.

Emily met Jessie in 2010 at the Marine Corps Ball in nearby Greenville, a blind date coordinated by a close friend.

When she went to the hospital after Jessie had been hurt they hadn’t been dating even a year, but she slept on the pullout couch next to his bed every night, waking up every 15 minutes when the doctors switched on the halogen lights to check Jessie’s vital signs and give him his medications.

She watched as he walked for the first time again, and held his head as he came off his painkillers.

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Jessie Fletcher, second from left, at his wedding last November.Credit SteveDavisPhotoVideo

Emily even moved jobs to join a law firm in Washington while Jessie recovered, eventually becoming his live-in caregiver when Jessie was finally released from the hospital.

The wedding was a reunion of sorts of Jessie’s Marine Corps brothers, and that night those bonds were celebrated alongside his matrimony.

There were two Robs, three Mikes, a smattering of Matts, and so on. All had worked with Jessie in some capacity, and all had watched as he healed during two long years at Walter Reed.

We drank in honor of Jessie, and we drank because we had united for a celebration of survival and not another death.

Joe, a good old boy from deep Mississippi, kissed me on the cheek and immediately made me hug his 3-year-old son.

The last time I had seen Joe’s son, Noah, was when he was a sonogram in an envelope that had traveled 7,000 miles to a combat outpost in some godforsaken village in Afghanistan.

Now I held Noah close and whispered to him how big of a clown his father was, and how I looked forward to telling him the unabridged version of his dad’s exploits one day.

Matt, an old light-machine gunner in my team, now attended the University of New Hampshire, and in between sips of wine lamented about his final exams.

Staring at Matt saunter across the room, I remembered staring at him in 2010 after he had been shot in the chest by a sniper, and we wondered if he would make it.

We took pictures together, and men who once would have been clad in body armor and rifles now wore teal ties and juggled children in their arms.

Jessie ambled around, gyrating on dual carbon-fiber prosthetics, smiling and introducing us to his actual brothers as his other brothers.

The Purple Heart on his chest glowed in the dimly lit atrium, and Matt shouted across the room, asking what exactly he got it for. We all laughed, because ignoring Jessie’s injuries would have been an insult.

His amputations were just as much a part of him now as was his hometown and his first kiss. He had embraced them, and it was time we did, too.

And so Jessie walked into that brisk November night a married man, with his best friends on either side of him. Much had changed since that day in Sangin, but the kid from Watertown had not.

He rolled down the window, waved with his three-fingered left hand, and sped away.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff (@TMGNeff) served as an infantryman with the First Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment from 2007 to 2011 and participated in two deployments to Afghanistan. He is a columnist at the blog War on the Rocks and the executive editor at Georgetown University’s newspaper, The Hoya.

For more than a year, I have been trying my hardest to move on with my life after being medically retired from the Marine Corps. I have developed compensatory strategies that allow me to succeed personally and professionally, despite having suffered a traumatic brain injury in Afghanistan more than three years ago. I haven’t just had to overcome T.B.I. since leaving the corps, though: I have also had to battle post-traumatic stress disorder, something that Luke, my service dog, has made much easier.

When I retired, I was informed that I would have annual check-ups to monitor my conditions for a total of five years. Missing these required appointments would result in losing all retirement benefits, such as pay and medical coverage for my family. So when I received military orders to confirm my appointments at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, I did so immediately. When I called, I was informed I had been scheduled for a neuropsychological evaluation, something I had previously had in 2012 as part of my retirement evaluation. The evaluation measures behavioral and cognitive changes resulting from central nervous system disease or injury, according to the University of North Carolina’s department of neurology.

I was less than thrilled when I got off the phone with Camp Lejeune. As part of my therapy and my new outlook on life, I choose to focus on positive things. But the results of a neuropsychological test point out all of your deficiencies by labeling you below-average or poor in certain functions of the brain. In 2012, I was depressed for two weeks following the receipt of my initial results. A medical opinion is one thing, but definitive test results can break your heart, when you think back to how you were before your injuries.

On Jan. 13, Luke and I went to my first appointment. Filling out the necessary paperwork before my appointment, I could feel my anxiety rising. My palms began to sweat and my knees began to shake. When the doctor called my name, my knees nearly buckled as I stood up. Walking back toward his office, I knew what was coming so I almost turned to walk away. But for the sake of my family I continued to his office.

Throughout our two-hour session I massaged Luke’s head to keep myself occupied and to manage my nerves. I’m sure the psychologist took note of it but I honestly didn’t care. As he flipped through my medical record, he seemed to stop at every trauma-related event noted within. He asked me about Fallujah, Iraq, and the two traumatic brain injuries I suffered there. As he continued through the pages, he stopped again and we discussed my threats of suicide in 2007 and 2011. We spoke about Afghanistan and my T.B.I. there. He asked about fallen comrades and whether any of my symptoms affected my relationships with my wife and daughter. We spoke of my suicide attempt in December 2012 and how I felt about having killed people. He even wanted to hear about the kinds of intrusive thoughts and nightmares I continued to have on a near-daily basis.

I understand that much like I had a job to do during my time in uniform, this Navy psychologist had a job to do as well, but I wondered if he noticed the tears welling in my eyes during the entire session.

I left feeling defeated and depressed, but I knew that that was just the start. Two days later I would be subjected to more than four hours of cognitive testing. A week later I would return for a debriefing of sorts and hear the results of my tests.

As I awaited the results of that evaluation, I found myself wondering whether there might be a better way to treat our combat-wounded veterans than to traumatize them every few years. There must be a more effective way to determine whether they have gotten better, or worse, than to pull them from their lives and undermine progress they may have made. I was told by my military psychiatrist in 2012 that it was her clinical opinion that I should not lead Marines into combat again, not just for my own safety but for theirs as well. I still believe that advice holds true today.

I fought for my country. I nearly died for my country. I will continue to do whatever I am told to do to maintain the benefits I rightfully deserve for the many sacrifices my family and I have made. But still, I must question the way the military machine handles its wounded service members. And after 12 years of war, there are thousands upon thousands of others out there, just like me.
Thomas James Brennan is a military affairs reporter with The Daily News in Jacksonville, N.C. Before being medically retired last December, he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines. He is a member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart and the recipient of a 2013 Dart Center honorable mention. Follow him on Twitter.

“Some give some, and some give more. Some have no clue to what they’re really fighting for,” Kristin Pruett sang at her home piano in Boise, Idaho, recently. She tape-recorded her holiday tribute to the family of veterans she’d married into, and put it online with photos.

It was the latest stanza in the song that is the Pruett family.

You might compare their lives to an opera or perhaps to a country music tune filled with politics and patriotism. Their story even has its own beat: eight service members with 11 deployments. All from one family.

“I never thought every single one of our children would serve,” said Leon, their 51-year-old father, now retired, who was a captain in the Idaho National Guard and an environmental safety and health manager at an agricultural products plant.

“The only one who hasn’t deployed is Mom,” the eldest son, Eric, 35, added.

I first met the family, all of whom served at one time with the Idaho National Guard, in 2004 while doing a television special for CNN.

At the time, four brothers (Eric, Evan, Greg and Jeff) were in Iraq. Leon and son Eren, 33, had just returned. Daughter Emily was finishing training.

“Schoolteachers and students started writing, and the boys wrote back from Iraq,” Tammy, their 55-year-old mother, said. “We even got a letter from a family who, during World War II, were in the same situation with several sons at war at the same time.”

Then, during a 2005 speech, President George W. Bush publicly thanked the family for its service. The praise came with a price, as some people criticized Tammy for supporting the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.

“People sent hate letters saying we had ‘blood on our hands’ and we’re ‘war-mongers,’” Tammy said.

Her four sons made it home safely, and the family spread out across America. But then came Emily’s turn.

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Four of the Pruett brothers at Fort Bliss in Texas before deployment in 2004. From left: Jeff, Eric, Evan and Greg.Credit Alex Quade

She had served with her father in the National Guard, but decided to join the active-duty Army in 2006. “Dad begged me not to go and join active-duty Army,” Emily said. “But it was the best thing for me: I got out of debt, felt good about myself.”

“When Emily deployed, that was weird,” her brother Greg, 32, said. “There were none of us over there with her. The rest of us always had another family member there, we had another Pruett to rely on. She didn’t. But we all understand the volunteer mentality.”

Their parents volunteered in a different way when Emily deployed to Iraq. She had recently divorced and had a baby girl, so her parents stepped in to help with the child care.

“We’d just moved to Wyoming and hadn’t bought the home yet, and here we are, grandparents, raising the baby in a camp trailer,” Leon recalled.

At one point, Emily was nearly killed when a rocket-propelled grenade hit a guard tower she had just left, injuring another soldier inside. “She was shook up,” Leon said. “That was one of the scariest moments for me, to get that phone call, even though all of us have had close calls.”

“I usually talked to Dad, because he knew what I was going through,” Emily said. “It scared Mom.”

Instead of becoming a casualty, Emily met her future husband, Everett Curry, a sniper who had been wounded during a previous tour in Afghanistan.

“I always said I wouldn’t be with an Army guy,” Emily said. “I’ve changed. Everybody comes back different. But in our family, we understand what each other have gone through.”

But think about it they did when four of the Pruetts were called up again in 2010. Tammy recalled fretting that “it was only a matter of time” before she lost one of her children.

But two of the deployments – Eren’s and Greg’s – were canceled, and only Eric and Jeff, 28, went back to Iraq, where they were among the last American troops to leave in the final withdrawal.

“It would’ve been not as bad as going with your Dad,” joked Eren, who once deployed to Iraq with his father as commander. “But Eric and Jeff would’ve been my bosses, so maybe it would’ve been worse!”

This time, Eric was the commander of Jeff’s unit. “He didn’t like being bossed around,” Eric recalled. “He’s used to it, since I’m his brother, but I was probably harder on him than the rest.” (Jeff didn’t see it that way. “Eric treated me equal to all other soldiers,” he said.)

Jeff had a 3-month-old baby when the deployment began, and the family got a “Flat Daddy” life-size photo of him to keep the baby company.

“Our wives had a much tougher job than we did,” Eric said.

That is partly why Greg’s wife Kristin decided to write a song for her extended family and put it online. She wanted to pay tribute to all the spouses left behind, too.

“Fighting at home or abroad, you are forced to rise above anything you thought was possible,” Kristin says.

Today, four of the Pruetts remain in the Idaho National Guard.

Greg, a sergeant, is the safety officer for an Army aviation facility. Eric is about to be promoted to major. Eren’s civilian technology job became a casualty of the government sequestration, but he still runs an arms training unit as a sergeant for the Guard. And Jeff, the youngest, is now a second lieutenant at Fort Rucker in Alabama, training to be an Apache helicopter pilot.

Evan, 32, who missed the birth of his first child while deployed, got out of the service. He’s a bartender now. And Emily, 28, is studying to be a radiology technician. Her husband, Mr. Curry, also 28, works for the Department of Energy.

“Evan and I are the black sheep of the family,” Emily said. “We both got out.”

And as for Tammy and Leon, they just celebrated their 26th wedding anniversary. Leon is now out of the Guard as well.

“He’s done being a weekend warrior,” Tammy said. “No itch to go back to war.”

The family has a broader message for the public. “Every soldier out there at some point, or their family, needs some help,” Eric said. “Sometimes everyone needs a shoulder to cry on, or how to deal with the kids that are having a hard time, or financial issues.”

Kristin Pruett’s song touches on this theme, too:

“Do you ever wonder about that family next door,” she sings. “Does it even cross your mind? She’s living in fear half the time that her husband will not make it home and she will be left all alone.”

Tammy admits to sometimes feeling guilty when she thinks about other families who have lost loved ones, while all eight of hers deployed and returned safely. “How do you answer that question for other families that haven’t been so lucky?” she asked.

Greg put it this way: “So much of America’s time and effort is focused on Hollywood stars, professional athletes and politicians. We too often forget that there are men and women across the world ready to lay down their lives for the cause of freedom. They don’t ask for much from their fellow citizens other than a prayer at night to almighty God for their safe return home.”

Alex Quade has worked in television for Fox News and CNN. She produced and directed a short documentary about Special Forces in Afghanistan, “Horse Soldiers of 9/11,” narrated by the actor Gary Sinise, that premiered at the G.I. Film Festival in Washington in 2012. “Chinook Down,” a video essay she did for At War, was awarded a national Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association in 2013.

During my enlistment, I had the privilege to serve as an infantry rifleman, the primary infantry job in the United States Marine Corps. My role was to locate, close with and destroy or repel the enemy, by fire and close combat. As I advanced through my career, I learned valuable teamwork, communication and leadership skills that I continue to use.

But even after two combat tours in Afghanistan, nothing scares me more than when my daughters ask me to match their outfits, pick their bows or braid their hair. I was thoroughly intimidated by having to figure out proper procedure for changing diapers. And few things have been more sobering than having to buy gifts before deployment for my family members — knowing that I might not see them again.

Indeed, before my most recent deployment to Afghanistan in early 2010, I sat at our kitchen table with cards for all sorts of occasions that I would miss over the next seven months — holidays; my daughter Alyssa’s birthday; my anniversary with my wife, Christy, who was pregnant with our second daughter, Audrey — laid out before me. Trying to think of what to say in each of them, I decided I would write to Alyssa and Christy first, saving Audrey for last. I must have thrown away 20 rough drafts with tears in my eyes as I tried to describe to our unborn daughter how much I loved her, quietly fearing that she would never know me beyond those few words.

After my enlistment ended in February 2011, I hoped that the hardest parts of parenting were behind me and that I would be able to do the many things with my family that I had missed. As time has gone by, slowly but surely, I have come to regain the trust of my girls, and I no longer have to buy gifts for my family knowing they might be the last ones I give them. Readjusting to civilian life has posed many challenges as I have tried to find my place not just in the working world, but also in the lives of my children. They remain convinced I will leave again.

Just this week, my oldest, Alyssa, who is now 5, finally got the courage to invite me to her school Thanksgiving play. She had asked my wife days before if she thought I would even be able come. It became painfully clear to me that she was still scared I would not be there when she needed me the most, as had happened too many times before.

Sitting in the audience as I watched my oldest daughter in her first kindergarten play, I felt as if I had finally become the man that my family needed me to be, that I was doing just what they needed me to be doing: to just be there. Alyssa spotted me in the crowd, and she grinned from ear to ear as she sang, “I am thankful for my dad.”

My family and I now have a place to call home, and we have come up with ways to talk about Daddy’s time in the Marines. The hardest concept for my children to understand was why I wanted to leave home and sleep outside in that place called Afghanistan. We have memorials of my fallen Marine Corps brothers on the walls of our home, and we honor their sacrifices. I tell the girls the stories of my friends who are now in heaven.

I have been a dad since I was 20, but just recently, I began to feel like I had finally become a father — and not just a father, but also a soccer dad, a cheer dad, indeed the only dad at “Mommy and Me” gymnastics. I have had many identities throughout my life, but the one I have found most fulfilling and meaningful is just that: father.

My military career now hangs in shadow boxes and picture frames, and my beautiful baby girls have more “uncles” in my fellow Marines than most children ever know. When they ask questions, I sit down with them and talk about the times Daddy slept outside — and how I will never do it again, unless I take them camping.

Zachary Edward Bell served with the First Battalion, Sixth Marines, from 2007-11 as an infantry rifleman, deploying twice to Helmand Province, Afghanistan. He lives in Tennessee with his wife and two children and works for a nonprofit veterans’ organization, Courage Beyond. He is currently pursuing his undergraduate degree in psychology at Lipscomb University in Nashville. Follow him on Twitter @ZacharyEBell.

Simone Gorrindo and her husband, Andrew, reunited at the end of Ranger School earlier this month in Camp Darby on Fort Benning.Credit Courtney Bond

As my husband and I have prepared for Christmas this year — picking up last-minute gifts, trying our hand at eggnog recipes, sharing wine late into the night — memories of last year’s season have been returning to me, clear and stark.

The day my husband left for Afghanistan last December, we celebrated Christmas, though the holiday was weeks away. The tree we bought at a Walmart parking lot gave our living room a bit of warmth, the cheap ornaments glittering among the lights. Around us, stacks of unpacked boxes bordered the room. Columbus, Ga., was our first permanent duty station, and we had just arrived here together three weeks before.

This was Andrew’s first deployment, but it wasn’t our first goodbye. The previous winter, he had left for nearly a year of training just 10 days after our courthouse wedding in New York City, where I had stayed and continued to work as an editor. Before finally reuniting in Columbus, we had had only a few merciful breaks from the silence: I had flown down to his graduations, spending weekends holed up in hotel rooms in nowhere towns like Lawton, Okla., before flying back to my life in New York where time moved at a blinding speed.

The world of the South felt foreign and strange to me: the vacant shop fronts, the stains of chewed tobacco on the sidewalk, the church marquees with missing letters — SIN ERS ARE WELCOME. The silence of the streets, empty of pedestrians, unnerved me. Time wasn’t going to speed by in this place.

I sat on our loveseat with a package in my lap, twirling its red ribbon around my finger. Next to me, Andrew, his calves tan and taut from hours of training in the Georgia sun, rested his feet on a chest he had inherited from his father.

“This goodbye feels harder than the others,” he said, staring out the window at the dead remains of summer ivy snarled around our fence. Until this moment, he had been excited, but his face looked stricken, as though he had only just realized where he was going, and that I wouldn’t be there.

Years before, when Andrew first mentioned his desire to enlist, I told him I would leave him if he did. But once it became clear that his interest was real, I pressed past the fear and said yes to a life I couldn’t begin to imagine because it was still less impossible to conceive than a life without him.

And now he was leaving me, for a place some people come back from on crutches or in caskets. It was a reality I thought I had prepared for, but I tried now to peer into the near future of that night and all the nights to come, and I couldn’t see how I would get through them. I couldn’t see anything at all.

Desperate for a distraction, I picked up his packing list that was sitting on the chest. There was still so much to get done. The list might as well have been written in another language, and the gear that lay strewn across the floor looked as if it had been shipped in from another planet. Neither of us dared to glance at the documents piled on the dining table: the power of attorney, the living will, the “Pink Book” requesting information I didn’t want to give — emergency contacts, if I am notified that my husband has been injured or killed.

We practically had to clock in farewell sex just 30 minutes before we left, stumbling down the hall into our barren bedroom. I had forgotten the clean sheets languishing in the dryer, and the naked mattress was hot and scratchy beneath us.

After we finished and he pulled away, I felt a wetness on my chest, tears I’m pretty sure he thinks I missed, because there was no evidence of them on his face. We lay next to each other, everything we weren’t saying throbbing between us, until he finally broke the silence.

“We still need to talk,” he said.

I had been pushing it off all week, the dreaded Before I Leave for Deployment Talk. He’d filled out the paperwork — What music do you want played at your funeral procession? Whom do you wish to deliver the eulogy? — but there were things he hadn’t written down.

“This is just another thing to check off the list,” he said.

And so, just minutes before leaving, he began to tell me the things he wanted, if anything were to happen to him: his best friend to officiate at the funeral, a burial, no talk of God or the military.

“But it is important to me that you and my mom receive a flag,” he said.

I felt my chest tightening. I had seen those flags, folded meticulously, placed in the hands of trembling wives. Andrew paused then for so long I thought he was finished speaking.
“And I want you to live a full life, to remarry, be happy,” he said finally.

Andrew had learned to talk casually about life insurance and death gratuities, but this felt different, like something he had always meant to tell me. He reached out to touch my face, but I turned away, queasy and uncomfortable in my skin.

When Andrew first joined the 75th Ranger Regiment, I had imagined a cinematic farewell at an airfield, a crowd of well-dressed women holding in their tears, bravely waiting to fall apart until the plane took off.

But most of the battalion was already in Afghanistan, and when we arrived at battalion headquarters to drop off Andrew, there were just a few women in the parking lot, all of them a mess — red noses, smudged eyeliner, sweatpants and unwashed hair. They didn’t look brave or scared; they looked tired and resigned as they gave their husbands a hug and a kiss goodbye before retreating to the safety of their cars.

Rangers say it’s a different war these days, but for the wives, not much has changed. The worrying, they tell me, feels the same. Their hearts still jump at a knock on the door; they still try to memorize their husbands’ faces. I buried my face in Andrew’s chest, wanting to capture his scent, to stow it away. He smelled like the Army, like sweat and unwashed men, a scent that had become a comfort to me, the one he came home with at the end of each day.

“Simone,” he said, nudging me to look at him. It was a request he had had to make before, the first time I said I loved him on the platform of an Amtrak station in Baltimore, and after our first kiss on a windy San Francisco Street at midnight, our audience a homeless man drinking out of a paper bag. Now that’s love, he had said.

I didn’t want Andrew to see me cry, but as I lifted my head to meet his gaze, the tears began to well up, and I resisted the urge, finally, to look away – from him, from the uncertainties of our future. We stood like that, his face becoming a blur through my tears, until someone called his name. He gave me a quick kiss before hitching up his pack, then jogged into headquarters, gone from sight.

There was no preparing for this, I realized, and there never would be. I had to trust not in Andrew or the war or my own ability to survive but in the simple facts of living. I could still stand, walk over to my car, and drive home. So I did.

When I got back to our brick house, the place was quiet and cold. It felt so far from New York City, and I did, too — a world away from its crowded streets, from the person I had been just weeks ago. I plugged in the Christmas tree lights to ward off the approaching darkness, and sat on the floor in the glow. Then, as night fell around me, I opened the boxes in the living room and began to unpack our life without him.
Simone Gorrindo is a writer and editor based in Columbus, Ga., where she lives with her husband, a soldier stationed at Fort Benning with the 75th Ranger Regiment. A former senior editor at Kindle Singles, she is currently a contributing editor at Vela and is at work on her first book, a memoir.

A drawn-out separation and a year in and out of marriage counseling that included three different therapists didn’t change the ultimate truth: My husband of 13 years and I are better off not being married anymore.

Would my marriage have survived if the military weren’t a part of it, if so much of our time together weren’t spent apart? I can’t answer that except to note that the military’s burdens on my former spouse’s time were so pervasive that I attended the majority of our couples counseling sessions solo. At the end of it all, we were two people moving in different directions and unable to find the foundation to stay together.

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“Don’t let your title as a military spouse become your entire identity,” Heather Sweeney once wrote.Credit Heather Sweeney

So as of today, I am also no longer a military spouse, a title I’ve worn proudly for over a decade. It was a role I fell into somewhat reluctantly, but one that I eventually grew to cherish. As challenging as the transition from wife to single mom has been and will be, I suspect that the transition from military spouse to military ex-wife will be just as difficult.

I’ve been writing about military issues from a spouse’s perspective for almost four years. Although I’d never come close to considering myself an expert on the subject, I’ve often been asked to advise other military spouses based on my personal experiences. And while I’ve written blog posts about relying on others for help during deployments and developing a sense of humor in the evil face of Murphy’s Law, my default, No. 1 piece of sage wisdom to my fellow military spouses was always to maintain a sense of self through all the craziness of military life.

“Don’t let your title as a military spouse become your entire identity,” I once wrote. “It’s only a piece of who you are, not everything you are. Make sure you nurture all those other pieces of you.”

Unfortunately, my divorce has made me realize that I didn’t entirely heed my own advice.

Most of my experiences as a wife, as a mother and as an adult include the military as a backdrop. The majority of my friends are military spouses. I can’t remember the last car I owned that didn’t sport a base sticker. I haven’t had health insurance that wasn’t Tricare since 2002. Being a military spouse is all I know.

A few years ago my military ID card was confiscated during a routine visit to the clinic thanks to my lack of attention to the expiration date on the back. Until I was able to coordinate schedules with my husband to get a new one (because I had failed to note the expiration date on my power of attorney as well), I was without a military ID. I had no base access. I couldn’t shop at the commissary. I couldn’t pick up my prescription. My wallet felt naked when I opened it to see my driver’s license in the space where my military ID should have been. Losing that ID was like losing a piece of me. I didn’t like it.

Now the status of my military ID is in limbo. My marriage wasn’t long enough for me to maintain any privileges bestowed by my ID, so technically I should be required to relinquish it now that the divorce is final. But I was told by a military lawyer that because my children are still dependents and will still use the medical facilities and other services on base, I can retain my ID so they can have access to their benefits. When my youngest turns 10 years old, at which time both children will have their own military IDs, I have to surrender my own.

On one hand, I almost wish my ID would be confiscated today, that I could ceremoniously hand it over to the powers that be and move on with my post-military life. Then I wouldn’t have the option to go back to base and see what I’m missing out on while I’m taking the kids to the doctor. I wouldn’t be able to drive past the exchange knowing that I can’t shop there. I wouldn’t see men and women in uniform and think back to the pride I once felt about having those uniforms in my closet. I would have a clean break. Quit the military life cold turkey and never look back.

On the other hand, I’m dreading the day that card will no longer be mine. Despite the challenges and rocky paths I trudged through, I loved military life. It changed me. It made me stronger, more flexible, more adaptable, more adventurous. How else would I have met the amazing friends I’ve made? How else would I have discovered so much about myself? How else would I have lived in Japan? How else would I have gained such an appreciation for our country’s service members?

Giving up my ID doesn’t erase those experiences, but it does draw a distinct line that marks the end of an era in my timeline. I will literally no longer be a card-carrying member of the military community. That sadness has nothing to do with my inability to work out at the base gym or get a military discount at my favorite stores. It has everything to do with the loss of the camaraderie and support I found as a military spouse. And I don’t want to give that up before I absolutely have to.

I’m not the first of my military spouse friends to face the transition of military spouse to civilian. In the past few months I’ve watched as friends’ husbands retired from the military. But they’re going through this transition with each other, navigating the new territory together. They have all jumped off the military cliff into civilian life while holding hands and comforting each other as they learn how to cope with their uncertain roles in marriages and life in general.

By choice or circumstance, I don’t have a partner to make this transition with me. I’m on my own in this foreign land called civilian life. My ex-husband will continue his military career for another decade filled with promotions and duty in interesting places around the globe. My children will continue to be military brats dealing with their father’s frequent absences and possible deployments. I don’t quite know yet where that leaves me other than simply a military ex-wife.

Ironically, my tenure as a military spouse has helped to prepare me for not being one. It taught me how to be independent, how to embrace experiences that are both unfamiliar and outside my comfort zone, how to talk to my children about difficult topics, how to ride emotional roller coasters, and how to handle adjustments in family dynamics and subsequent changes in my roles and responsibilities.

I may not have followed my own advice about allowing my part in a military marriage to consume my identity, but I have no regrets. I am who I am because of it.

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At War is a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other conflicts in the post-9/11 era. The New York Times's award-winning team provides insight — and answers questions — about combatants on the faultlines, and civilians caught in the middle.

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